I have had the same hardware and installed various versions of (red hat) linux many times over the past years. It has always autodetected all my hardware and autoconnected to my Internet provider. Originally my local cable company using DHCP then my local phone company (ADSL) also using DHCP. At no time did I ever configure any networking, I just told whatever version of red hat to use DHCP and we were off. I hadn't been using linux much but now I'm enrolled in computer science and wanted to stop using Win2k so thought I'd install a newer version of everything but suddenly I have no ability to connect to the network. Again, no hardware has changed -- except I did install 256 meg more RAM. The ADSL "modem" has remained connected, the nic is the same, everything is exactly as it was, where it was. Win2k continues to access my ADSL connection 100% of the time. I installed Fedora core 1 and, as usual, the installation was flawless -- except after install, there is no connection to the DHCP server. At boot it says 'bringing up eth0...' then a line about failing to get ip settings or something. Trying to get eth0 to work after boot is similarly useless. It waits for approx 1 minute each time then says "failed". I have reinstalled 6 or 7 times with different strategies, but no different results. I tried a SuSE network install, but it also fails to get any sort of connection (but that may be because I have no idea what "parameters", if any, are needed for the nic. Interestingly, I tried reinstalling Red Hat 7.2 and it did not set up my nic properly but this is NOT the problem with Fedora and SuSE. BOTH are identifying my nic properly and fedora, at least, installs the "proper" driver. The nic is a D-Link but it has always been identified as a DEC 21x4x based card. I even took the damn thing out to read the chip numbers to make sure I wasn't remembering it wrong. (And I *wasn't* remembering wrong.) So I "rebooted" the "modem" by unplugging it, hoping to get new IP leases, or whatever. No change. Win2k still works perfectly, linux still fails to contact anything when first attempting to find the dhcp server. btw, l0 works fine (i can ping 127.0.0.1). there seems to be no dhcpcd or pump on fedora, but i did find that dhclient works from the terminal but that has the same results as attempting to use the graphical interface to "start" eth0. Except with dhclient I get many lines of output while the minute elapses and before I get the error saying no DHCP offers were received. Basically it says it's sending a request, then another, then another, etc. No response, then it times out. btw, Win2k (and OS/2 before it, and various red hats before it) never wait(ed) any amount of time to get their DHCP IPs. It happens in a few seconds, not in a minute or more. ifconfig shows everything "working. There is an entry for l0 and one for eth0 with all kinds of info for each, but no IP for eth0 (of course). I'm going on memory here since this has been an oddysey for 3 days and the only net connection I have is from win2k. I read somewhere there was some bug and "fix" about requiring a hostname of *any* kind to get eth0 working but I tried that and it changed nothing. (In fact, the symptoms I read about didn't seem to be happening on my machine, but I thought I'd try anyway.) I saw on my win2k system the IRQ of the network card was 9 but fedora was trying to say it was 10 so I tried to change it to 9 to see what would happen but nothing did. I'm not really sure how to change an IRQ. I just went to the nic entry in some networking tool in the Gnome gui somewhere and changed the drop down list for the nic's IRQ from "unknown" to "9" and rebooted. no joy. I read some networking howto and got some vague ideas about things to try but none did anything. I know I'm not providing much technical detail here but I can't remember some and don't know what all would be needed to diagnose anyway. So, summary: - the nic is recognized and a driver is installed and it appears to work. - the adsl 'modem' works for sure since Win2k continues to connect - the attempt to find the dhcp server at my phone company and get an ip address for eth0 fails 100% of the time in linux Question: where do I look next? What do I try and how do I try it? What information do I try to extract from those attempts? How do I apply that information (if acquired) to fix this damn thing? Thanks for the patience -- Trevor Smith | trevor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
